For what it's worth, One of my early conversions is going on 7 years with a set of Trojan T-105s. She is plugged into shore power most of the time, but sails a couple times a week on average and gets run pretty hard when she does. She has two Guest 2620A dual output smart chargers. They put out ten amps per channel, and each channel is charging a pair of T-105s. Ten amps is a normally considered little small for those 225AH batteries, but since the boat isn't often sailed on two consecutive days it has plenty of time to recharge between use. Also, I think an advantage of using undersized chargers is that you don't have to water the batteries as often. Once a year has proven sufficient in this case.
The current owner once let it go for two years and when I heard about it I made it a point to go service them myself and found a few cells with the tops of their plates exposed. I would recommend more frequent service of course. In this case the batteries are hard to get at and the owner is somewhat technophobic, which is not a good combination. My recommendation (stating the obvious I suppose) is that if you're installing FLAs, make them easily accessible and stick to a maintenance schedule. Start with shorter intervals and extend them as you get a feel for water usage. I think it's reasonable to expect 10 years of good service from a set of good flooded golf car batteries in this kind of use.
Jim
--- In electricboats@yahoogroups.com, "acsarfkram" <acsarfkram@...> wrote:
>
> Hi Pat,
>
> The AGM's in my boat just pasted the 3 year mark a couple of months ago and they seem fine. The boat is used year round and pretty regularly. Most of my use is out of a slip and when back at the slip I plug in to shore power.
>
> I had flooded LA batteries on a previous electric sailboat (36 volt trolling motor) they worked fine for the two years I had the set up but I did have to keep an eye on the water level.
>
> I'm pleased with the AGM's so far.
>
> Mark
> Santa Cruz
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